From time to time, I will also post on things that I am reading, a book from Interlibrary loan [ILL], or a research project and discovery as well. The more we write about what we read, think, or discover, the more attune we will be to our research projects and goals in understanding history; historians, as writers, achieve full expression as history and language converge to form a dialogue about the past.
One of the books that I have just started reading [note the use of I is OK on this blog], is Brian Levack's The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (Yale 2013). [See how I italicized the title to make the blog head toward the realm of "professional" writing]. I have long admired this distinguished historian of the witch-hunts and still use his witch-hunts textbook in class. I have also read a lot of his newer articles, particularly about Scotland, some of them a bit long-winded. But I think this might be his best book yet in just the few chapters that I've read, largely for his empathetic argument.
One of the attributes of the historian as a writer is his clarity of expression. Levack knows how to organize chapters. As a plus for this book, he knows how to excite the general reader--in his preface he established a personal link to possession: in the late 1970s Levack and his wife foster-cared for a baby that had been abused because his parents thought he was possessed. Many people in the modern world believe in possession, not only the pope.
Another feature of the book that I admire is how he tries to understand the past on its own terms, which is something I have tried to inculcate in my classes on the premodern world. As Levack writes, the "main purpose is to 'make sense' of the pathological behavior that demoniacs displayed in both Catholic and Protestant communities" (vii). [See how I used MLA when necessary on this blog]. He points out that historians have been the least sympathetic to the possessed, arguing that they were ill or fakers. Levack instead argues that most Europeans believed in the Devil and that afflictions like contortions, vomiting, speaking in unknown languages were part of the subculture of society so it was only natural that people adopted these measures, as part of the "script". Not fakers, not ill, but rather participants in the religions tensions of the age.
Finally Levack gives much credence to his earlier arguments that the tensions from the Reformation enhanced the fear, anxiousness, and religious climate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when possession cases were well-known. Interestingly, possession was much more rare for the medieval period.
I look forward to using some of his evidence in the classroom, and especially exploring his analysis of levitation! I need to "make sense" of that.
SW
